After a last minute dismissal of a plea filed by one of convicts in the Nirbhaya gang rape case in the Supreme Court, four convicts in the 2012 case were hanged inside Tihar Jail in New Delhi at 5:30am on Friday.
Director General of Tihar Jail Sandeep Goel confirmed the death of the four convicts. "Doctor has examined and declared all four dead," he said.
Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were executed by Pawan Jallad, the hangman from Uttar Pradesh's Meerut district.
The execution was carried out according to the 2018 Delhi Prison Rules.
The execution procedure began early in the morning, with the jail officials taking the four to the scaffold with their hands pinioned behind. The officials covered their faces with cotton masks just before they entered the gallows. The executioner then strapped the convicts' legs and adjusted the rope tightly around their neck. He pulled the lever when he got the go-ahead from the jail superintendent.
The execution was carried out in the presence of the jail superintendent, district magistrate and medical officer.
The bodies of the four convicts have been taken out of Tihar Jail for post-mortem at DDU Hospital.
Last minute plea dismissed by SC
Barely three hours before the scheduled hanging, the Supreme Court in a pre-dawn hearing on Friday brought down the curtain on the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case by dismissing a plea of one of the four death row convicts against rejection of his second mercy plea by President Ram Nath Kovind.
A bench comprising Justices R Banumathi, Ashok Bhushan and A S Bopanna rejected the fervent plea of Pawan Gupta that his mercy plea had been wrongly rejected by the President without considering the fact that he was a minor at the time of offence in 2012.
This is the first time that four men have been hanged together in Tihar Jail, South Asia's largest prison complex that houses more than 16,000 inmates. The executions were carried out after the men exhausted every possible legal avenue to escape the gallows. Their desperate attempts only postponed the inevitable by less than two months after the first date of execution was set for January 22.
Eight-year-old legal battle
The 23-year-old physiotherapy student - who is popularly known as Nirbhaya - was raped and tortured in a moving bus by a gang of six people in New Delhi on December 16, 2012.
Nirbhaya died a few days later.
Main accused Ram Singh died in custody - police said he had committed suicide - on March 11, 2013.
Friday's execution marked the end of the eight-year-old legal battle.
The convicts had used many legal remedies to stall the execution.
On Friday – just 24 hours before they were hanged - the four urged the Delhi court to stop the execution as they want to explore a few more legal remedies.
The death warrants were deferred by a court thrice on the grounds that the convicts had not exhausted all their legal remedies and that the mercy petition of one or the other was before the president.
On March 5, a trial court issued fresh death warrants for March 20 at 5.30 am as the final date for the execution.
